A Soldier's Duty - Review

Parameters, Autumn, 2001 by Martin L. Cook

A Soldier's Duty. By Thomas E. Ricks. New York: Random House, 2001. 320 pages. $24.95.,

Much has been said and written in recent years about the state of civil-military relations and subordination of the US military to civilian leadership. Certainly the tension between the values of the officer corps and the civilian leadership has, in recent years, been marked and great. Contributing significantly to that discussion was Thomas Ricks' earlier nonfiction work, Making the Corps, and his many well-informed articles on military affairs in The Wall Street Journal and, in more recent years, The Washington Post.

In this novel, the author takes full advantage of the liberties fiction allows to explore the attitudes of some Army officers in particular on this subject. The novel's premise is that the President orders a deployment of ill-prepared forces on a humanitarian mission against the weight of professional military advice. Email begins to fly from untraceable addresses criticizing the deployment and, increasingly, advocating public expressions of dissent by uniformed officers, culminating in direct action to sabotage the deployment itself.

A thoroughly engaging mystery story unfolds as investigations are undertaken to determine the source of the emails and sabotage. The details of the plot would, of course, ruin the mystery for the reader. But the narrative vehicle gives Mr. Ricks ample opportunity to introduce extensive dialog among his characters on questions of the nature and scope of "a soldier's duty"--to the Constitution, to elected political leaders engaged in (from the military perspective) ill-advised action, to military superiors and subordinates, and finally to the Army. The author claims that much of this dialog is not his own creation, but plucked verbatim from emails he has received or had forwarded to him from serving officers. Indeed, they have the ring of reality.

The novel is effective as fiction, but it aims at more than engaging pastime reading. Mr. Ricks' real purpose is to raise pointedly the questions of ethical obligation and professionalism of an officer corps frustrated with taskings it often questions, if not outright rejects. Without the defining threat of the Cold War, the author perceives a military separated from and, to some degree, alienated from the American society it is pledged to serve. Mr. Ricks illustrates effectively the human tensions of obedient service to civilian leaders whose judgment some officers distrust, when those leaders send them on missions whose purposes are murky, in an atmosphere of casualty aversion and political management of the military aspects of the deployment.

The author's portrayal of senior Army officers is in many respects unflattering and, in the case of one officer and his subordinates, literally criminal. But he also shows good officers struggling with the ambiguities of strategic-level leadership, trying to triangulate their way through the complex pressures of supporting administration policies which, in private, they have opposed. He shows the challenges to their integrity in keeping their pledges to give their honest personal opinions to Congress when required, and yet not appearing to lobby for policies opposed to the President's. All of that, of course, is framed in light of their passion to protect and defend their service, and their pain in placing soldiers on deployments where their worst fears come true and ill-trained troops take casualties on missions they opposed in the first place.

A Soldier's Duty is bound to be a controversial and challenging read for any thoughtful military officer. One might well dissent from the picture painted of the state of civil-military relations as too bleak, too polarized. But one would have to look far for a novel that touches so deftly on the complexities and challenges of leadership of military organizations at the highest levels. However one reacts to the choices of these particular characters, reflection on the environment in which they strive to serve the nation, the Army, and their soldiers is a vitally important intellectual exercise. I know of no other work of fiction that forces the complexity of those questions so clearly on the reader.